The Lavender in Room 310: St. James Hotel in Red Wing

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated October 16, 2026 · How we verify

Wheat money built the St. James Hotel in Red Wing, and more than a century later the building is still trading on two things: a riverfront address in southeastern Minnesota, and a set of stories about who else might be staying there. The hotel is a working, well-appointed property on the National Register of Historic Places. It is also one of the most frequently named haunted buildings in the state, with the talk concentrated on two rooms and a smell of lavender.

Quick Orientation for the St. James Hotel in Red Wing

• Built: 1874 to 1875, in the Italianate style.
• Opened: with a grand ball on Thanksgiving Day, 1875.
• Listed: National Register of Historic Places, 1977; the listed area was expanded in 1982 to become St. James Hotel and Buildings.
• Now: a member of Historic Hotels of America, the official program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, with 62 guest rooms.
• Access: an operating hotel. You book a room like anyone else.

Eleven Businessmen and a Million Bushels of Wheat

The hotel exists because of a commodity boom. In the early 1870s Red Wing was the world’s largest primary market for wheat, with a warehouse capacity of over one million US bushels by 1873. That kind of money brings buyers, agents, speculators and tourists, and the town did not have anywhere suitable to put them. Eleven prominent local businessmen invested in the construction of a hotel to solve the problem.

What they produced was not a boarding house. The St. James was one of the most elaborate hotels anywhere along the Mississippi, serving the city through its heyday as a commercial center and a steamboat stop. It opened with a grand ball on Thanksgiving Day, 1875, which tells you exactly how the owners intended the place to be regarded.

Guest lore from later decades, repeated locally and by the hotel’s own storytellers, has politicians and gangsters passing through, and liquor quietly served during Prohibition. Treat that as the hotel’s folklore rather than as documented record. The architecture and the dates are verifiable. The guest list anecdotes are not, at least not from the material that survives in the public record.

The Red Wing Shoe Company Rescue

The second chapter matters as much as the first. In 1977, the same year it reached the National Register, the hotel was purchased by the Red Wing Shoe Company and renovated. The new owners also gave it two additions: a shopping courtyard, and a further section containing offices and hotel rooms.

For years the hotel had 61 guest rooms, each decorated individually and each named for a riverboat that once worked the Mississippi. In early 2010 a new suite was created in the old Red Wing Iron Works Building, bringing the total to 62. That is worth knowing if you are chasing a particular room number: the building you walk into is a nineteenth century core wrapped in late twentieth century expansion, and not every corridor is as old as the facade suggests.

Clara Lillyblad and Room 310

The best known story attached to the St. James concerns Clara Lillyblad, described in the hotel’s lore as a former chambermaid, and said to remain in room 310. There is no public documentation presented for her life, her employment or her death. She is a figure of legend here, and should be read that way.

What guests describe in and around 310 is consistent in tone rather than dramatic. A sudden scent of lavender where no one has been. A reflection caught at the edge of a mirror that is gone when looked at directly. A sense of being accompanied in an empty room. Nothing in that list requires an explanation beyond expectation and an old building, and several of those reports come from people who booked 310 knowing its reputation. That does not make them liars. It does mean the room is primed before anyone unpacks.

The Cowboy in Room 605

The second named presence belongs to room 605, where the figure reported is a cowboy: an incongruous character for a Midwestern river town hotel, which is probably part of why the story has stuck. Accounts are thinner and vaguer than those for 310, amounting mostly to a glimpsed figure and a sense of occupation in an unoccupied room.

Elsewhere in the hotel, the reports flatten out into the standard vocabulary of old hotels everywhere: cold drafts in hallways, whispering with no source, the brush of an unseen hand, doors and fittings behaving oddly. A masonry building from the 1870s that has been renovated, extended and re-plumbed will produce drafts, noises and temperature swings as a matter of engineering. Paranormal groups have worked the building with EVP recorders and EMF meters, as they do almost everywhere with a reputation, and nothing from that work has established anything under controlled conditions.

Staying at the St. James

This is one of the easier haunted locations in Minnesota to see for yourself, because there is nothing to sneak into. The St. James is an operating hotel on Main Street in Red Wing with 62 rooms, a shopping courtyard, and a membership in Historic Hotels of America. Book directly through the hotel if you want a specific room, and ask about 310 or 605 at the time of booking rather than wandering the upper floors looking for them.

Those floors are private space for paying guests, and the hotel is a business first and a ghost story second. Go for the Italianate architecture, the riverboat room names and the view of the Mississippi, and treat anything else as a bonus you cannot schedule.

Address: 406 Main Street

Sources

• St. James Hotel, a Historic Hotels of America member
• NPGallery Asset Detail (National Park Service)
• Loc (official)
• St. James Hotel | Historic Hotel in Red Wing, MN
• Wikipedia: St. James Hotel (Red Wing, Minnesota)

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